Book picks similar to
The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President by Lee Smith
politics
non-fiction
government
audible
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank the Irishman Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa
Charles Brandt - 2004
The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors. In the course of nearly five years of recorded interviews Frank Sheeran confessed to Charles Brandt that he handled more than twenty-five hits for the mob, and for his friend Hoffa. Sheeran learned to kill in the U.S. Army, where he saw an astonishing 411 days of active combat duty in Italy during World War II. After returning home he became a hustler and hit man, working for legendary crime boss Russell Bufalino. Eventually he would rise to a position of such prominence that in a RICO suit then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani would name him as one of only two non-Italians on a list of 26 top mob figures. When Bufalino ordered Sheeran to kill Hoffa, he did the deed, knowing that if he had refused he would have been killed himself. Sheeran's important and fascinating story includes new information on other famous murders, and provides rare insight to a chapter in American history. Charles Brandt has written a page-turner that is destined to become a true crime classic.
Make Russia Great Again
Christopher Buckley - 2020
Herb Nutterman never intended to become Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. Herb served the Trump Organization for twenty-seven years, holding jobs in everything from a food and beverage manager at the Trump Magnifica to being the first general manager of the Trump Bloody Run Golf Course. And when his old boss asks “his favorite Jew” to take on the daunting role of chief of staff, Herb, spurred on by loyalty, agrees. But being the chief of staff is a lot different from being a former hospitality expert. Soon, Herb finds himself deeply involved in Russian intrigue, deflecting rumors about Mike Pence’s high school involvement in a Satanic cult, and leading President Trump’s reelection campaign. What Nutterman experiences is outrageous, outlandish, and otherwise unbelievable—therefore making it a deadly accurate account of being the chief of staff during the Trump administration. With hilarious jabs at the biggest world leaders and Washington politics overall, Make Russia Great Again is a timely political satire from “one of the funniest writers in the English language” (Tom Wolfe).
How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies: Deliver Winning Conservative Arguments Against Mainstream Media
Will Witt - 2021
Most young people have never even heard of conservative values from someone their age, and if they do, the message is often bland and outdated. Almost every Hollywood actor, musician, media personality, and role model for young people in America rejects conservative values, and gen Zs and millennials are quick to regurgitate these viewpoints without developing their own opinions on issues. In How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies, political commentator and media personality Will Witt will give young conservatives the ammunition they need to fight back. So many young people in America want to stand up for their beliefs in their classrooms, at their jobs, with their friends, or on social media, but they don’t have the tools to do so. Will Witt arms Gen Zs and millennials with the knowledge and skills to combat the leftist narrative they hear every day.
Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again
Dan Pfeiffer - 2020
Un-Trumping America offers readers three critical insights: first, Trump is not an aberration, but rather the logical extension of the modern Republican Party; second, how Democrats can defeat Trump in 2020; and third, preventing the likes of Trump from ever happening again with a plan to fix democracy.While the catalog of the president's crimes is long and growing, undoing Trumpism -- the political platform of racism, authoritarianism, and plutocracy that gave rise to Trump and defines the Republican Party -- is a long and continuing fight. Through a craven, cynical strategy engineered by Mitch McConnell, funded by the Kochs, and fueled by Fox News propaganda, Republicans have rigged American politics to drown out the voices of the people in favor of the powerful. Without an aggressive response that recognizes who the Republicans are and what they have done, American democracy as we know it won't survive this moment and a conservative, shrinking, mostly white minority will govern the country for decades.Un-Trumping America dismantles toxic Trumpism and offers a way forward. Dan Pfeiffer worked for nearly twenty years at the center of Democratic politics, from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill to Barack Obama's White House. But it was Trump's victory and Republicans' incessant aiding and abetting of Trumpism that has radicalized his thinking. Here, Pfeiffer urges Democrats to embrace bold solutions -- from fixing the courts to abolishing the electoral college to eliminating the filibuster -- in order to make America more democratic (and Democratic).Un-Trumping America is a powerful call for Democrats and progressives to get smarter, tougher, and more aggressive without becoming a paler shade of orange.
The Unmaking of the President 2016: How FBI Director James Comey Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency
Lanny J. Davis - 2018
Then FBI Director James Comey sent his infamous letter to Congress on October 28, saying the bureau was investigating additional emails that may have been relevant to the Hillary Clinton email case. In The Unmaking of the President 2016, attorney Lanny J. Davis shows how Comey’s misguided announcement—just eleven days before the election—swung a significant number of voters away from Clinton, winning Trump an Electoral College victory—and the presidency. Davis traces Clinton’s email controversy and Comey’s July 2016 appearance before Congress, in which he said the Clinton email matter was effectively closed. From that moment until Comey’s late October letter to Congress, Davis says, Clinton was destined to be elected president by substantial popular and electoral vote margins. But the decision to send his October 28 letter, so near to the election, not only violated long-standing justice department policies but also contained no new facts of improper emails at all—just pure speculation. Davis shows state by state, using polling data before October 28, and on election day, how voter support for Hillary Clinton eroded quickly. He proves that had the election been held on October 27, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidency by a substantial margin. Despite so many other issues in the closing days of the campaign—Trump’s behavior, the Russian hacking, reports of Clinton momentum in marginal states such as Georgia, Arizona, even Texas—after the October 28 Comey letter, everything changed. References to “Clinton emails” and “new criminal investigation” dominated media coverage virtually round-the-clock through election day November 8. Now Davis proves with raw, indisputable data how Comey’s October surprise cost Hillary Clinton the presidency and changed American history in the blink of an eye.
Parkland: Birth of a Movement
Dave Cullen - 2019
David Hogg called out Adult America. The uprising had begun. Cameron Kasky immediately recruited a colorful band of theatre kids and rising activists and brought them together in his living room to map out a movement. Four days after escaping Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, two dozen extraordinary kids announced the audacious March for Our Lives. A month later, it was the fourth largest protest in American history.Dave Cullen, who has been reporting on the epidemic of school shootings for two decades, takes us along on the students’ nine-month odyssey to the midterms and beyond. With unrivaled access to their friends and families, meetings and homes, he pulls back the curtain to reveal intimate portraits of the quirky, playful organizers that have taken the nation by storm. Cullen brings us onto the bus for the Road to Change tour showing us how these kids seized an opportunity. They hit the highway to organize the young activist groups mushrooming across America in their image. Rattled but undeterred, they pressed on in gun country even as adversaries armed with assault weapons tailed them across Texas and Utah trying to scare them off. The Parkland students are genuinely candid about their experiences. We see them cope with shattered friendships and PTSD, along with the normal day-to-day struggles of school, including AP exams and college acceptances. Yet, with the idealism of youth they are mostly bubbling with fresh ideas. As victims refusing victimhood, they continue to devise clever new tactics to stir their generation to action while building a powerhouse network to match the NRA’s. This spell-binding book is a testament to change and a perceptive examination of a pivotal moment in American culture. After two decades of adult hand-wringing, the MFOL kids are mapping a way out. They see a long road ahead, a generational struggle to save every kid of every color from the ravages of gun violence in America. Parkland is a story of staggering empowerment and hope, told through the wildly creative and wickedly funny voices of a group of remarkable kids.
Flyover Nation: You Can't Run a Country You've Never Been To
Dana Loesch - 2016
The internet responded with immediate outrage, posting death threats and vicious online reviews, and forcing them to shut down. All for expressing a personal opinion rooted in faith, in response to a completely hypothetical question. A new front in the culture war had been opened. When the owners of the pizza parlor told Dana Loesch on a Blaze TV interview that they might never reopen, Loesch started a fundraising campaign. Hundreds of thousands of dollars quickly poured in to support them. The people donating weren’t taking a stand against gay rights; they just believed that a random mom-and-pop shop shouldn’t be run out of business because media and political elites on both coasts caricature and vilify rural Americans. Most of the problems with our country today can be traced to a very simple cause – the growing disconnect between the government and media elites and the rest of us, the old-fashioned, hard-working, God-fearing Americans who are proud to live in middle America. As Loesch explains, too many people getting on their high horse about Wal-Mart have never shopped in one. Protesters outraged at small town cops have never been helped by one. Environmentalists who claim to want to protect the spotted owl have never been in the woods with one. Atheists who attack committed Christians have never sat in a pew with one. Loesch doesn't take aims solely at the Democrats; some Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail have also forgotten what life is like for the people back home. While these so-called leaders may have forgotten the people in coal towns and farming communities, the voters in those communities haven't forgotten Washington's betrayals. And it will show in 2016. As one of the most powerful and recognizable voices on talk radio today, Dana Loesch is leading a revolution of America's new Silent Majority.
The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage
Mara Hvistendahl - 2020
government for trying to steal trade secrets, by a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.In September 2011, sheriff's deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a field where a farmer was growing corn seed under contract with Monsanto. What began as a simple trespassing inquiry mushroomed into a two-year FBI operation in which investigators bugged the men's rental cars, used a warrant intended for foreign terrorists and spies, and flew surveillance planes over corn country--all in the name of protecting trade secrets of corporate giants Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer. In The Scientist and the Spy, Hvistendahl gives a gripping account of this unusually far-reaching investigation, which pitted a veteran FBI special agent against Florida resident Robert Mo, who after his academic career foundered took a questionable job with the Chinese agricultural company DBN--and became a pawn in a global rivalry.Industrial espionage by Chinese companies lies beneath the United States' recent trade war with China, and it is one of the top counterintelligence targets of the FBI. But a decade of efforts to stem the problem have been largely ineffective. Through previously unreleased FBI files and her reporting from across the United States and China, Hvistendahl describes a long history of shoddy counterintelligence on China, much of it tinged with racism, and questions the role that corporate influence plays in trade secrets theft cases brought by the U.S. government. The Scientist and the Spy is both an important exploration of the issues at stake and a compelling, involving read.
Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
Bernie Sanders - 2016
In the book, Sanders shares experiences from the campaign trail and outlines his ideas for continuing a political revolution to fight for a progressive economic, environmental, racial and social justice agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Michael Wolff - 2018
Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.
Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump
Laura Ingraham - 2017
They joined a movement that swept the unlikeliest of candidates, Donald Trump, into the Oval Office. Can he complete his agenda? Or will his opponents in the media, protestor class, and political establishment block his efforts and choke off the movement he represents?In Billionaire at the Barricades, Laura Ingraham gives readers a front row seat to the populist revolution as she witnessed it. She reveals the origins of this movement and its connection to the Trump presidency. She unmasks the opposition, forecasts the future of the Make America Great Again agenda and offers her own prescriptions for bringing real change to the swamp of Washington.Unlike most of her media colleagues, Ingraham understood Trump’s appeal and defied those who wrote his political obituary. Now she confronts the president’s critics and responds to those who deny the importance of his America First agenda. With sharp humor and insight she traces the DNA of the populist movement: from Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, to Nixon’s Silent Majority, to Reagan’s smashing electoral victories.Populism fueled the insurgency campaigns of Buchanan and Perot, the election of George W. Bush, and the Tea Party rallies of the Obama presidency. But a political novice—a Manhattan billionaire—proved to be the movement’s most vocal champion. This is the inside story of his victory and the fitful struggle to enact his agenda.This book has also been published as Busting the Barricades: What I Saw at the Populist Revolt.
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Tom O'Neill - 2019
What really happened in 1969? In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a magazine piece about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Weren't the facts indisputable? Charles Manson had ordered his teenage followers to commit seven brutal murders, and in his thrall, they'd gladly complied. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept finding holes in the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative, long enshrined in the best-selling Helter Skelter. Before long, O'Neill had questions about everything from the motive to the manhunt. Though he'd never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, the Manson murders swallowed the next two decades of his career. He was obsessed. Searching but never speculative, CHAOS follows O'Neill's twenty-year effort to rebut the "official" story behind Manson. Who were his real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement act on their many chances to stop him? And how did he turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's hunt for answers leads him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from the Summer of Love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with cover-ups and coincidences. Featuring hundreds of new interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. In those two dark nights in Los Angeles, O'Neill finds the story of California in the sixties: when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away.
The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy
Masha Gessen - 2015
The facts of the tragedy are established: On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs fashioned from pressure cookers exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others. The elder of the brothers suspected of committing this atrocity, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the ensuing manhunt; Dzhokhar will stand trial in January 2015. What we don’t know is why. How did such a nightmare come to pass?This is a probing and powerful story of dislocation, and the longing for clarity and identity that can reach the point of combustion. Bestselling Russian-American author Masha Gessen is uniquely endowed with the background, access, and talent to tell it. She explains who the brothers were and how they came to do what they appear to have done. From their displaced beginnings, as descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era, Gessen follows them as they are displaced again, from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and then, as émigrés to the United States, into an utterly disorienting new world. Most crucially, she reconstructs the struggle between assimilation and alienation that ensued for each of the brothers, fueling their apparent metamorphosis into a new breed of homegrown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere—a split in identity that seems to have incubated a deadly sense of mission. Like Dave Cullen’s Columbine, this will be the enduring account of an indelible tragedy.
All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump
Edward Klein - 2017
Who are these determined and ruthless individuals who are waging all-out war against the president? Why have left-wing progressives and members of the conservative establishment joined forces to drive Trump from office? And what does this mean for the future of American democracy?Edward Klein, the former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, and the investigative reporter behind #1 New York Times bestsellers The Amateur and Blood Feud, exposes the villains behind the plot to destroy Trump."In America," writes Klein, "you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to overthrow the democratically elected president of the United States and inflict irreparable damage on our country. That, however, is what Trump's enemies on the Left and Right are doing with lies, leaks, obstruction, and violence.For those who want to join the effort to prevent these villains from crippling our democracy, All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump is essential reading.
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It
Lawrence Lessig - 2011
Federal Election Commission trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that business interests wield control over our legislature.With heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how we arrived at this crisis: how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic-and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left-Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system. He puts the issues in terms that nonwonks can understand, using real-world analogies and real human stories. And ultimately he calls for widespread mobilization and a new Constitutional Convention, presenting achievable solutions for regaining control of our corrupted-but redeemable-representational system. In this way, Lessig plots a roadmap for returning our republic to its intended greatness. While America may be divided, Lessig vividly champions the idea that we can succeed if we accept that corruption is our common enemy and that we must find a way to fight against it. In REPUBLIC, LOST, he not only makes this need palpable and clear-he gives us the practical and intellectual tools to do something about it.